Foucault’s painting of the modern legal system can be seen in the police murders of unarmed black people. As we see videos of black men being harassed and killed by law enforcement we begin to normalize the spectacle of black death. A new study finds killings are now the leading cause of death for young men, particularly, young black men (Edwards et al., 2019). Though Foucault argued “punishment, then will become the most hidden part of the penal process” (p.9) I would push back and point to these very public (thanks to social media) spectacles of discipline and punishment. We have become the spectators to legal death (or execution) as we see black bodies parish at the hands of police in the name of justice or perhaps the protection of others. Judgement and examination is then had on a very public and legal level. We see police officers and black bodies become adjudicated as we all become spectators to the violence and trials online and in our city streets. Even more, we begin to see how judicial power and punishment affects the officer, the condemned, and the viewing public.
As Taylor notes, “in order to be empowered by seeing, to be able to look back at the monstrous gargoyles without turning into lifeless stones, we must see beyond the theatrical frame and decode the fictions about violence, about torturers, about ourselves as audience” (p.137). To reject the role of the passive spectator, we must look beyond any manipulations of the realities in front of us. The thing about the Black Lives Matter movements and those alike is that they typically bring the police officer under persecution. It makes us (re)consider our relationship to justice and it’s affiliated systems. Instead of bringing the black body to question, the mob turns to look at the enforcer (the police officer) as the cause for violence and injustice. In this case, crowd mobilizes against the toxic officer and against the penal process to fulfill “the dream of purging the community of the impure elements that corrupt it” (Girard, p. 16, 1986).
Edwards, F., Hedwig, L., Esposito, M. (2019). Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, 116(34). doi: 10.1073/pnas.1821204116